BAM Portal - Service Unavailable

From time to time I get the 'HTTP Error 503 - The Service is nnavailable' when I try to access my BAM portal

Usually I spend a few minutes before I remember how to get past this. It is the account configured to run bam that needs to have its password updated. Most of you should change yor password on a regular basis, and its easy to forget to reconfigure BAM with the new passord. So.. here is the solution:

Open Microsoft BizTalk ServerConfiguratiuon tool and update the password for the user running BAM portal

When deploying a wcf service to biztalk the is a good chance you will run into:

The Messaging Engine failed to register an adapter "WCF-BasicHttp". Details: "Registering multiple adapter types within the same process is not a supported configuration. For e.g. HTTP and SOAP receive adapters cannot co-exist in the same process"

Solution
When installting a SOAPm HTTP or WCF service on the same WebServer then seperate app pools must be created for each adapter. Using seperat app pools will solve the issue. Note the this is only a problem om win servers as desktop version of windows does not have an app pool concept.

One of the easiest ways to update a bam activity from an orchestration is to use the BAM API, Simply add reference to

Microsoft.BizTalk.Bam.EventObservartionMicrosoft.BizTalk.Bam.XLANGs
to your project and you are ready to start.
In the basic level you have to start, update and end an activity.

Start Activity
I reccomend creating variables for activity name and instanceID, To avoid any confutions. The Activity name must match the Activity name created and deployed using bm.exe. (I will create a seperate post for this)

The code in start-bam-expression-shape in orchestration PreProcessInvoice will then look something like this:

activityName = ("ProcessInvoice");//this is the activity we are loading data intoactivityInstance = System.Convert.ToString(System.Guid.NewGuid())+"PreProcessInvoice"; //if bamming to same activity from different orchestration, we may track where the data is comming from by adding orchestration name.